ANALYSIS OF PERIPHERAL PRESSURE VARIATION FOR FIVE INLINE CYLINDERS IN UNSTEADY LAMINAR CROSS FLOW

Abstract

The effect of pressure variation and fluctuating forces along the periphery of five inline cylinders has been studied numerically at Reynolds number 200. The numerical methodology and the code employed to solve the Navier– Stokes and continuity equations in an unstructured finite volume grid are validated for the case of flow past two tandem cylinders at three spacings. Further, adopting the validated methodology, flow over five inline cylinders is numerically investigated for nine different gap ratios. The Reynolds number is based on the diameter of cylinders, D. The wide range of gap ratio chosen in this paper provide significant insight into the variations of drag and lift forces with time as well as the variation of pressure coefficient which not only varies with time but with the angle along the cylinder periphery also. The flow behavior was observed with increasing gaps. The post processing work was done for data which was not directly available from ANSYS Fluent and fluctuation of force coefficients as well as pressure coefficient was analyzed for each cylinder yielding meaningful graphs. The results may have direct practical application for safe and wise design of cylinder like components in fluid flow.